Category Archives: physics

Electric Motors Undressed

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I find the variety of electric motors to be remarkable, and the textbook explanations of their operation nearly impossible to relate to any particular motor I’m trying to fix. Usually I don’t know why it works, even after I fix it, unless I take a week to study it, and I rarely have that kind of time. The diagrams in the references never look anything like the real motors!

Enter John Storey of the University of New South Wales Physics Department, and his brilliant How Real Electric Motors Work web pages.

Americans will have to remember that mains frequency in Oz is 50 Hz – hereabouts, line frequency is 60 CPS.

standard model validated

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As everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock already knows, CERN’s claiming that the LHC has found proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson. If true, it means that the standard model now adequately explains the properties of mass and gravity. The finding of the particle is very similar to the way that early chemists “filled in the blanks of the periodic table” by making the assumption that the model reflected a real state of affairs and looking for the missing pieces.

It’s sad that the USA has essentially shut down our particle physics exploration at the federal level, and it’s too bad the Tevatron didn’t find the Higgs boson in their last run for glory.